Àngels Barcelona inaugurates "Undo, erase, activate" by Jorge Yeregui

Àngels Barcelona inaugurates on April 2 the exhibition of Jorge Yeregui Desfer, erase, activate a research project on the symbolic value that nature has acquired at the beginning of the 21st century. The proposal works on the process of renaturalizing an urbanized space within a natural park. A landscape intervention promoted by different administrations that highlights the natural heritage of a region and that will serve to raise different questions about the cultural connotations involved in this operation.

This work intends to reveal this change of perspective by taking as a specific case the Place of Tudela, located in the natural park of Cap de Creus (Girona). In this location there was a process of deconstruction and renaturalization of a space that had been exploited for years as a spring. This is a very particular case in which this paradigm shift with respect to what is natural acquires a new dimension - that of reverting an urbanized territory to a previous state - and that allows new questions and questions to be raised in relation to the way in which how we perceive and relate to the environment.

Club Med was built during the real estate boom of the 1960s and opened its doors to an area of 240 ha. with capacity for 1,200 visitors. The resort included two restaurants, a bar, a swimming pool, sports courts, a small theater, a nightclub, a small private port and a large number of bungalows to accommodate tourists. In 1997 Cap de Creus was declared a Natural Park, but this space maintained its hotel activity until 2004, as a small urban island within a protected natural environment. With the closure, a long process of natural recovery began, which, its most representative intervention, consisted of the demolition and emptying of the existing buildings. A gesture of enormous symbolic and formal value that is accompanied by a set of measures and interventions that are less visible but equally important in the restoration process, both in a landscape and ecological sense.

It is important to note that all these actions aimed at renaturalizing the site revolved around a common element: the presence of a boundary, a line drawn on the map that for decades has segregated two territories, thus separating the public space of the private. It was intensifying its border character over the years, also differentiating the natural space from the artificial one, the autochthonous landscape from the tourism landscape, the original and the tax, the protected from the dispensable. .

Undo, delete, activate, which can be visited until May 21, focuses on the presence of this line and the deletion process. Working on both sides, the project acquires a certain performative character in which the location from which each image is taken is decisive to analyze the "seam" of the territory.